4 Camping Trips. 3 States. Phew.

Now that our camping season is unofficially over - we may try to squeeze one last one in October - Cole is asking us when we're going camping next. We just had to go camping FOUR times in order for him to get warmed up to the idea. It didn't hurt that he made a friend along the way.  I am pretty proud of us for doing this. When we focus on something, we go all the way. Like when we were hiking in the spring time, we went like every week, sometimes twice a week. Then the heat and the humidity hit and we switched gears and focused our energies on relaxing and living outdoors instead of exercising outdoors. We were lucky in that the weeks we picked to go camping were not overrun by the heat, although there were a couple days where we were thanking our lucky stars we picked sites in the shade.

We completed two trips to the mountains that were two nights each - at Lake Taghkanic and Mongaup Pond (both in NY). And we accomplished camping near the beach for four nights in Rhode Island and at the beach for three nights in Connecticut. Each camping trip was started the day after the kids were in daycare, so we spent four day care days preparing, strategizing and packing. We spent countless other hours before each camping trip, shopping, meal planning and packing and re-packing. A lot of the packing credit goes to Keith, who packed and repacked the trailer until he got it just right. We also made a good investment in a portable potty for the trailer so that we didn't have to leave the camper at night. We did this after Allison told us about something she bought called a Luggable Loo. We tried a cheapened version of that in the form of a sheetrocking bucket for the second trip and I was gagging by the morning. It was then that we knew we had to buy something.

It looks something like this...

Having this thing made it easier to get up at night and not wake the baby. If I'm gone for too long, she starts to notice and that wakes her up. Plus, if Cole had to wake up and walk outside to the bathroom every night, he'd probably wake up too. No rest for the weary. It was a very necessary and smart purchase. I'm glad we did it.

Something else I'm proud of us for is for not putting up with noisy neighbors. We stopped suffering  and called the park police on two different trips. In the past, when we've been woken up by loud drunk people who think their campsite is like their living room, we've always sucked it up and not complained, especially since the noise never seemed to bother Cole. This time, camping with two children made us realize we needed to do something about it, since we needed all the sleep we could get. And on the second trip, even Cole could not fall asleep with the thumping of the loud music being played. Coincidentally enough we only encountered noisy neighbors on our trips to the beach. Why do people get so wasted at the beach? Something about beer and the ocean, I guess.

We learned that camping with friends who also have a child or children makes camping so much easier and so much fun. With that in mind, we're going to try to plan more trips with friends (than without) next summer. A trip with Allishawn is in the works, though Shawn can't do more than two nights. He's just not an outdoorsy kind of guy. We'll just stick around for another two or three nights.

We discovered some amazing campgrounds and plan to return to three of them next year. We loved Lake Taughkanic, Mongaup Pond and Hammonassett Beach. We didn't love Burlingame. The beaches were beautiful and the campground was okay, but we just didn't get that tingly feeling like we HAVE to return there next year. A big negative was that if you weren't close to the big bathrooms, which weren't that many, you were stuck going to a Port-a-John.  We were there for 3 days before they emptied the one closest to us. Talk about smelly.


Below are some of my favorite shots by my talented husband...

Lake Taughkanic...

Sleepy heads. (this was obviously taken by me)

We tried for a group shot. Don't know if we succeeded.

This is how Cole says cheese when he's not in the mood to say cheese.

Playing.

This was the morning of our departure.

Story hour

Mongaup Pond...

Go away duck! Go away!

Burlingame...

First encounter with the Beluga Whale.

Hammonassett Beach...

Meigs Point

On the breakwater

Tackling the ocean

Cole and his new friend read Cookies Week.

My babies.